Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Thursday, September 18, 2014

What is Gluttony?

This just over the transom from a reader:

I like food. From the time that I was in the food and beverage industry, I found much of it a delight. There was a beauty to the craftsmanship of creating and serving food and drink. One of my very favorite things to do is to cook a fine meal paired with a great beer and see my wife enjoy both. I consider myself a novice in cooking, so I like to browse through cook books and food magazines. On my breaks from my academic reading, I like to watch videos about food and cooking. So then came a question to my mind: What distinguishes me from the glutton?

I have always been a slim man, so I'm clearly not physically gluttonous. But is that what really constitutes gluttony? Would it not rather be the undue preoccupation of food and its enjoyment that would make one a glutton? Where do you think the balance lies in enjoying food and the sensations it brings because the Lord has made creation and made it good and we can partake of it without being gluttonous?

Being of Italian extraction, I am also attracted to the pleasures of the table. I too like food and I like cooking. I can't quite relate to people who wolf their food without savoring it or think of eating as a chore. And it surprises me that so many men (and contemporary women!) are clueless when it comes to the most basic culinary arts. You can change a tire or fix a toilet but you can't make a meatloaf? I had a housemate once who literally didn't know how to boil water.

Let me begin with the reader's claim that being slim rules out being physically gluttonous. I don't think that is the case. But it depends on what physical gluttony is. Spiritual gluttony, the pursuit for their own sakes of the quasi-sensuous pleasures of prayer and meditation, is not our present topic. Our topic is physical gluttony, or gluttony for short. It is perhaps obvious that the physicality of physical gluttony does not rule out its being a spiritual/moral defect. But what is gluttony?

Gluttony is a vice, and therefore a habit. (Prandial overindulgence now and again does not a glutton make.) At a first approximation, gluttony is the habitual inordinate consumption of food or drink. But if 'inordinate' means 'quantitatively excessive,' then this definition is inadequate. Suppose a man eats an excessive quantity of food and then vomits it up in order to eat some more. Has he consumed the first portion of food? Arguably not. But he is a glutton nonetheless. To consume food is to process it through the gastrointestinal tract, extracting its nutrients, and reducing it to waste matter. So I tentatively suggest the following (inclusively) disjunctive definition:

D1. Gluttony is either the habitual, quantitatively excessive consumption of food or drink, or the habitual pursuit for their own sakes of the pleasures of eating or drinking, or indeed any habitual overconcern with food, its preparation, its enjoyment, etc.

If (D1) is our definition of guttony, then being slim does not rule out being gluttonous. This is also perhaps obvious from the fact that gluttony has not merely to do with the quantity of food eaten but with other factors as well. The following from Wikipedia:

I think it is clear that one can be a glutton even if one never eats an excessive quantity of food. The 'foody' who fusses and frets over the freshness and variety of his vegetables, wasting a morning in quest thereof, who worries about the 'virginity' of the olive oil, the presentation of the delectables on the plate, the proper wine for which course, the appropriate pre- and post-prandial liqueurs, who dissertates on the advantages of cooking with gas over electric . . . is a glutton.

There are skinny gluttons and fat gluttons, and not every one who is obese is a glutton, though most are.

In short, gluttony is the inordinate consumption of, and concern for, food and drink, where 'inordinate' does not mean merely 'quantitatively excessive.' It is also worth pointing out that there is nothing gluttonous about enjoying food: there is nothing morally wrong with enjoying the pleasures attendant upon eating nutritious well-prepared food in the proper quantities.